Day 8 -- All Day in Monument Valley and a Tour -- Unrecorded Miles

Well, we've now accomplished a lifetime goal that we've flirted with for years, but we had never attempted until today. We took the jeep tour (truck tour, actually) through Monument Valley with an onboard guide. The instructions we received when we bought our tickets were simple: be ready to go at 8:00 a.m.; wear warm clothing; and if you wear a hat, bring one that won't blow off in the wind. Well that seemed easy enough. It's only a short walk to the office where the truck would arrive to pick us up. We wisely wore hooded sweatshirts thinking we could tie them around our waists if it got hot later in the day, and I figured I could probably keep my ballcap on in any sort of wind even if I had to turn it backwards. It all sounded pretty simple.

Concetta and I walked to the office at ten minutes to eight, and the truck was already there with its complement of passengers, and we only needed to hop aboard. The morning was cool but not brisk so we figured there wouldn't be much need for the sweatshirts. Well, the driver of the truck soon demostrated that we were wrong. The fairly young Navajo woman took off down the highway like the Starship Enterprise accelerates to "warp speed." Before too many seconds had passed, we two were pulling on the drawstrings of our sweatshirts to try and deflect more of the cold air roaring through our seating area while we huddled together like two survivors in an open lifeboat.

Nice and warm in the truck cab, I'm sure the driver didn't even notice that while the morning air was mild enough to sit outside and have your breakfast coffee, the morning air at fifty-five miles an hour felt decidedly different. Fortunately, it was only four or five miles at that speed, and we slowed to approach the gate for touring Monument Valley. Then, our entrance fees paid by each of the four couples aboard, we all too soon were bucking and jolting over super rocky terrain and slipping and sliding through miles of six-inch-deep sand.

It was a good thing that the truck had seat belts and grab irons that allowed us to stay seated. Otherwise, we all would have been tossed out into the sage and cacti patches that lined the road. I couldn't think of a bumpier ride I had ever experienced, but it reminded me of personal accounts I've read in my studies of history by riders aboard the horse-drawn stage coaches of the frontier west. Samuel Clemens has a particularly vivid account of his trip west in 1864 with his brother Orion in his book, "Roughing It." I found myself wishing for the sandy areas because the truck rode a lot more smoothly.

Most of the time the scenery is so breathtaking that you really don't mind hanging on for dear life. One word of warning, however. Don't try to take photos from the back of the moving, bouncing, jolting, sliding, careening truck. You'll have plenty of opportunity to shoot when you disembark from the vehicle.

The thing that struck me about the 300 hundred million-year-old sandstone monoliths and majestic mesas in Monument Valley was the completely different character they all took on depending on the light that was stiking them. They can be anything from boring and bland to vivid and awe-inspiring depending on whether the sun was high in the sky, or whether it was hitting them a glancing blow from the side. The very same formations you see in the morning light can look completely different in the afternoon light. If I was a serious photograher, I'd have to come stay for a week or two and shoot the same formations in different kinds of light. I think it would be especially thrilling to shoot Monument Valley during storms.

The next thing that intrigued me was the flora throughout the valleys. There didn't appear to be water avaialbe anywhere we could see, but a whole spectrum of plant life seemed to both survive and to thrive. Unfortunately our guide was not so well versed in plant history, but we heard later from an elderly Navajo grandmother that when she was a girl her mother, who lived to be 102 years old, would collect as many as three dozen different desert-dwelling plants to use either as food, medicine, or dyes for her weaving yarn. She told us about one plant that was known to be poisonous but could be placed on your gums if you had a toothache.

When we visited the Navajo grandmother, it was in her traditional Navajo Hogan where she customarily receives members of the public and where she demostrates her weaving skills. Concetta and I have always been fascinated by weaving crafts and often seek out demonstrations when we're traveling. This particular time, while I was watching the grandmother spinning wool for her weaving, I happened to glace up at the rafter construction of the Hogan and was surprised both by the simplicty of the engineering and by the rock-solid sturdiness of the final product. I'm not sure what the style is called, but I bet you could place a full-sized pickup truck on the rounded dome of the Hogan, and the dwelling would have no trouble supporting it.

One word of advice if you decide to visit Monument Valley, come early in the spring. According to our guide, all the roads are just mobbed with tour vehicles further into the summer. And the public may also drive their own cars and off-road vehicles into the area. Though this morning we saw a very tiny group of other tour trucks in all the areas we visited, by the time we were leaving at 11:30 a.m., there was about twenty times as many vehicles that kept passing us as they entered.

Here at the Monument Valley KOA, you can buy tickets for the tour and the tour vehicle will pick you up in the camp. I definitely recommend them. You can also bring your RV to another camp located to the west of our current location called, I think, Gouldings. Gouldings has their own fleet of tour trucks, but is a smaller camp and more difficult to find a spot to park your RV. Both camps are your basic sand and gravel desert landscaping, though both have trees next to most spaces. Come early in the spring, and you won't have any problems.